Books, arts and culture

Hitler and Stalin

The Q&A: Timothy Snyder, historian

SOME topics are so dark that even scholars feel intimidated. Yet Timothy Snyder is not so easily daunted. A professor of Eastern European history at Yale, his most recent book, "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin", examines some of the most devastating collective memories of the modern world. With scholarly rigour and engaging prose, he seeks to explain both the causes and effects of the two most haunting mass murderers of the 20th century. The "bloodlands" of the title describes the area where the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered 14m civilians.The Economist has praised the book for being a "revisionist history of the best kind", one that "makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe's modern history."

The book has been controversial among some Holocaust scholars, many of whom argued that Mr Snyder does a disservice by comparing the crimes of the Nazis with those of the Soviet Union (something Mr Snyder discussed in an interview with The Economist when the book first came out last year).

Mr Snyder was recently in Poland to promote a Polish-language edition of his book. This month his tour will take him to the Netherlands, England, Australia and Israel. In a conversation with More Intelligent Life, Mr Snyder talked about his approach to the book, which is meant to clarify some common misunderstandings about the second world war.

What are some of the most common misconceptions of the history of the so-called "bloodlands"?

The first is that there's something that people think they understand and it turns out that they don't, and that thing is the Holocaust. The reality of it is, if anything, worse than they think, much more face-to-face, much more barbaric, much more unforgettable. People think that the Holocaust is something that happened in Germany, generally to German Jews. They think it's something that happened only in Auschwitz. They generally don't know about any of the other death facilities besides Auschwitz; they generally don't know that half of the Jews who were killed were shot rather than gassed.

Hitler and Stalin killed virtually in the same place, and that is Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Baltic states, western Russia. The Holocaust happened in a place where millions and millions of people have just been killed due to the Soviet policies.

And the third thing I would point to is the habit of reduction. For example an approach saying: it must have all been the Germans, or it must have all been the Soviets. Both of these systems brought tremendous death and suffering. If you want to avoid criticism then you shouldn't be a historian, because historians are trying to understand and explain. If you're trying to please people then you should go into the fashion business, or the candy business.

You've lived in Eastern Europe for a while, and you have learned the languages spoken in the ‘bloodlands'. Would you say it's much harder, or even impossible, to get to certain information if you don't speak the local language?

The question of languages is very important. If you don't know Russian, you don't really know what you're missing. Imagine that you're in a huge country house and you have keys, but your keys only open some of the rooms. You only know the part of the house that you can wander in. And you can persuade yourself that that's the whole house, but it's not. We can only see as much, and we can only go as far as our languages take us. I wrote this book in English, but there are very important conversations that are happening in German, Russian, Polish and so on among those historians, and the book is addressed to all of them.

At a lecture at the Kosciuszko Foundation a few months ago, you said that your goal is not to compare the crimes of Hitler and Stalin. But how does one write about the casualties caused by both without forcing the reader to compare? How do you resist the urge to draw clear comparisons while writing such a book?

It's not that I'm against comparisons per se. On the contrary, I think a comparison is totally natural. It's just that if you want to compare you have to know what it is you're comparing. People often generate these comparisons thinking: 'I already know about the Nazis' or 'I already know about the Soviets. Therefore, I know that the Nazis were worse.' Often they don't know a lot about the other side of the conflict. I like to think that people will read this book and then be able to make better comparisons.

Westerners tend to know the history of Nazi Germany better than the history of the Soviet Union. Why is that? Is there more literature about the Nazi crimes than the Soviet ones in English?

Something interesting happened when the cold war ended: the US stopped being so concerned about the Soviet Union. Our teachers and professors strive desperately to save something from the 20th century, and that something is the Holocaust. It's been happening since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Part of this has to do with an issue of identification. People in the West tend to identify with western victims. So even when they think about the Holocaust, they really think about the German or French victims, they're not thinking about the Polish, Hungarian or Soviet victims. And when they think about the German crimes, they're not thinking about the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war, which also killed 3m people; they're not thinking about the partisan campaigns in Belarus, which no one has ever heard of, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. They're thinking of the people they can identify with—nice, middle class, western-looking people. So it's not that people only know about the Holocaust. It's just that they have this very western idea of the whole tragedy. What I try to do in my book is to make the Holocaust more ‘eastern', which it was.

How did you pick the individual, personal stories that are included in the book? They are effective in giving names and faces to the otherwise inconceivable numbers of casualties.

It was important to me that a book that was mainly about a tragedy on a tremendous scale be comprehensible. I did my best to explain the policies, but also to make sure the readers understood that the victims were human beings. That's why I have the material about these individuals. It's about life and death, and life is made of individual human beings. And the significance of death is that it ends a life.

Writing a book like this you don't want to seem too mechanical, but you also don't want to be sentimental, and say that only because they died all these people were good. That's not the point. I was trying to make these people real. And if you make them ideal, they're not real.

Readers' comments

The thrust of Snyder's comments seem to be that what happened in Europe between WW1 and the death of Stalin needs to be judged by the cultural standards of the people who lived in Germany, Russia and all the lands in between. This is a view consistent with the fact that for centuries Prussia, Poland and Lithuania were the buffer states which kept the inheritors of the legacy of the Mongol hordes away from the wealthy European west. These countries even to-day bear the consequences of the militaristic culture which was essential to those buffer states if they weren't to be overwhelmed from the east. In the 15th and 16th centuries Poland and Lithuania practically bisected Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The eventual collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 led to a process which resulted in the unitary state of Germany but not before seeing much of it former lands fall to the Eastern Empire (Austria). The precursors to the Prussian state meanwhile were in what we know as the Baltics to-day. War, fighting and the homogenisation of a militaristic culture gave the 20th century lands we are discussing here a major part of their cultural heritage. And, let's face it, that is a culture which succumbs easily to the lure of Fascism, as in the 20th century so many states in the region and outside it (Italy, Spain) did indeed do so. Even in Britain and the USA 'modern' fascism had its popular appeal.

One might argue about this bird's eye view of cultural central European history but after World War 1 the whole area east of Germany was fought over without restraint. Within western Russia itself there was civil war. Ukraine was briefly a separate nation for the first time in its history. The Russians under Tukachevsky stood at the gates of Warsaw only to be defeated by Stalin's incompetence in the South. Poland, briefly submerged before WW1, was saved, pro tem, at least.

So the 1930s saw a militarising Germany in the West, an already militarised Soviet Union in the East, a ruined region in between in which Fascist political leaders flourished. Then came a war between a fascistic orthodox communist regime and a bunch of communist heretics (the Nazis). Religious wars bring out the worst in people and the Eastern Front was no exception. The Russians defeated the Germans at least in part because they were even more barbarous than their enemies.

And so the conditions for the Holocaust were set, and the scenario duly played out. But those same conditions gave Stalin his mood music too, mood music which led him to slaughter some 30 millions of his own citizens without the benefit of German intervention. Of course Stalin was a Western ally in the war and 'Uncle Sam' was duly grateful to 'Uncle Joe' despite the fact that he'd systematically looted the Manhattan Project of all its secrets but could only afford to turn to making Nukes for himself after the war. Many Russians starved in the economically thin period he forced on his people to get his nuclear jollies, but in the same period the Americans tried to make peace with a man who believed his country needed enemies to keep it together and the only threat he could make his people believe was real was the wishy-washy sentimental USA. 'Uncle Joe' indeed! But it was an image he wanted to cultivate.

The Nazis sickened the West with their industrialisation of murder. It doesn't make any difference if you die by shooting or by gas, you die before your time anyway. Stalin, eventually, sickened the West because of the unremitting brutality he couldn't hide, and not only did he kill millions of his own people on the slightest provocation but also the entire Polish Officer Corps of some 22,000 of whom only 4,500 were ever found, at Katyn. And it took the West until the 70s before they accepted it was a Russian, not,a German atrocity. Why? well they didn't want to be caught up in a lie and they went along with the Russians' lies post-war.

And why were the Polish Officers Killed? (It was spring 1940) Well, many of them were from the upper classes so enemies of the people. Stalin had the idea that by wiping them out he'd more easily be able to turn Poland into a puppet state post-war, so he had both a theoretical motive and a pragmatic one.

We have to remember that the Jews weren't the only ones subjected to systematic murder, so easy to do in the prevailing culture and times. Then there were the slave labourers too, rounded up from the captured countries regardless of class or ethnicity. the Nazis wanted to get rid of them and their evidence too as the war turned against them but there were too many and it was too late to do much and for the most part they were abandoned. But many died, like the Jews in Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka and in Belsen and Dachau too, dying of malnutrition and maltreatment rather than being shot or gassed.

Hitler and Stalin couldn't be dread dictators if others didn't collude in their dreadfulness.

Timothy Snyder's intention to promote a Polish-language edition of his book is commendable. A lot has been published about pre-war, wartime and post-war years in Polish that few people in the West have ever read. Although his "Bloodlands" has numerous references to Polish sources there is certainly room to expand the topic by drawing on relatively recent sources. An example is a very sensitive issue of a 'Stalinist' justice administered in post-war years on members of the war-time Polish underground, including the Home Army ('Armija Krajowa') as well as on minorities. Krystyna Kersten has published both in Polish and in English on the methods of 'ethnic cleansing'. Among the authors who have published on post-war concentration camps in Poland, such as Jaworzno, Swietochlowice and others, that were brutally run by Moscow-trained communists (such as a gangster Shlomo Morel) are Mateusz Wyrwich, Henryk Pajak and Stanislaw Zochowski. A new perspective on the realities of life under Nazi occupation in Poland, including on issues of collaboration and resistance, is found in Tadeusz Piotrkowski's "Poland's Holocaust". There are, of course, numerous other sources that must be known to Timothy Snyder and to other prominent historians studying the real dimentions of the tragic period in the "Bloodlands".

I just finished reading Empires and Barbarians by Peter Heather which brings up the slave trade in Medieval Europe. It turns out that it was precisely those regions, lying between present-day Germany and Russia, which were the main hunting grounds of early European slave traders (before they moved on to Africa). Somehow it feels as if these regions never really recovered from that shock.

It takes a couple of generations at least, before historians can coolly assess the horrendous atrocities of the 20th century. Perhaps this time has now arrived. But even so, historical writing must needs remain an account of past events as interpreted by our own present-day biases. Thus we will always judge the horrible atrocities committed by Alexander the Great, for example, differently from those committed by Napoleon, the Turks, or by the European colonial powers.

'Something interesting happened when the cold war ended: the US stopped being so concerned about the Soviet Union'

Perhaps the most idiotic statement ever made. The implication is that the US had a version of Soviet history that was better than after the end of the Cold War. As a recent event, bear in mind that those at school during the Cold War are now in power, some even teaching, so his arguments are flawed.

An important difference between the two murderers is that one was sponsored by the West and the other was portrayed as a Communist and vilified.

Interestingly, Trostky warned of the murderous intentions of both parties, Lenin warned of Stalin but died before he could take action.

The bloodlands in question have a history of war dating back through to B.C.E. - the lands between Europe and 'the Asiatic hordes'.

Dialectical comparisons with the other 'European frontiers' of Spain (Civil War) and the Balkans (1900-1914 and the Civil War) are worth more exploration than an comparison of this single area and two murderers who exploited a common European discourse and one that is now being extended to North Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan.

So many amazing female heroines of WWII that fought the Nazi's. Poland's Irena Sendler was truly astounding in her accomplishments. Personally helped 2,500 Jewish children escape the torment of Nazi persecution.